Please write this down if you are a regular here. f you can't get to www.substancenews.net, please send us an e-mail message to Csubstance@aol.com or Gnschmidt@aol.com or Smgschmidt1@aol.com. For about ten hours between the evening of June 23, 2011 and the morning of June 24, 2011, the main Substance website was "down." Readers and staff members trying to get to www.substancenews.net were receiving strange messages, some beginning 'SQL ERROR...'

A Blog Troll or a hacker? As regular readers know, Substance is a news site, not a blog. That's why Substance bans the anonymous and pseudonymous commenting usually found on blogs. Whether the recent attack on Substance came from a troll, hackers, or someone who loves Rahm's Emanuel and Barack Obama is irrelevant. The result is the same.If you have the time and find this problem (it's not on our end but out there in Cyberspace), please take the time to send us an email about the problem, copying and pasting the "Error" message into your email. We may not respond (except to say Thank You). It's happened before, and given the power of those we challenge, it's likely to happen again.

While you're at it, ask your friends to Donate or Subscribe (the red and blue buttons on the right). We're proud that we're not the whores of the billionaires. Jonah Edelman may get a puff piece in the Chicago Tribune for his brilliant ability to raise $3.5 million from the nastiest (and richest people) in Chicago, but our base is much more real than a handful of Pritzkers and Crowns. In order to sustain what we do, however, people who can't write a check for $500,000 (what Ken Griffin of Citadel gave to Stand for Children to buy Springfield in December 2010) or $50,000 (the serial checkings that the Pritzkers did for "Stand" in December) have to put some dollars here. We make it rather easy. A subscription brings you the print edition every month. A donation brings your a thank you.

Subscribe and tell your next 11,000 Facebook "friends" to do the same and we'll all live happily ever after. Or until the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt and send a couple of tsunamis all the way from Gaspee to Lake Superior. At that point, who'll notice if one cranky website isn't up?

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